Semper Mars (37 page)

On the way down, some moments later, the ground shifted slightly beneath his feet. Alexander put his gloved hand out to steady himself… and never realized how close he’d come to actually touching the cunningly concealed rock doorway leading to the Face’s interior.

The Cydonian Face had clung to its secrets for half a million years, now. It could wait a little longer…

2042

E
PILOGUE

Thursday, April 3

Washington, DC

1230 hours EST

Marine Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway walked through the automatic doors of the Golden Samurai, one of Washington’s most distinguished and exclusive restaurants. Formerly known as Le Maison d’Or, the place had been widely known for its exquisite French cuisine.

Now, with Japan’s formal entry into the war on the side of Russia and the United States, it was a Japanese restaurant. Kaitlin shook her head at the inaccurate faux-Buddhist wood carvings and decor above the ornamental koi pool in the dimly lit lobby. During World War I, she’d heard, it was treason in most parts of the United States to own a dachshund, and sauerkraut had been renamed victory cabbage. In World War II, thousands of Nisei, Japanese only by accident of descent and as loyal as any typical, native-born Americans, had been declared threats to national security and herded into concentration camps.

This time around, French, German, and Mexican restaurants were going out of fashion, even out of business, while Japanese and Russian restaurants flourished. Tacos were known now as “Martian sandwiches,” and two weeks ago the town of Paris, Texas, had formally voted to change its name to Garroway.

It was, she reflected, one hell of a crazy world.

The restaurant’s sound system was playing the “Stars and Stripes Forever.” That was another sign of the changing times. Patriotism was fashionable in America again, and patriotic music, especially Sousa marches and military anthems, could be heard in the unlikeliest of venues.

Kaitlin removed her hat and tucked it under her arm, then paused to tug the jacket hem of her blue dress uniform straight. She’d been a Marine for almost a year now; she’d joined two days after getting her degree at CMU and been on her way to ten weeks of OCS at Quantico ten days after that. People with her quals in computer science, she’d learned, were worth their mass in antimatter to the Corps… and the fact that she happened to be the daughter of “Sands of Mars” Garroway, hero of Garroway’s epic march, had guaranteed her any ticket in the US Marines that she cared to write.

She’d considered changing her name. She wasn’t going to go to the stars on her father’s long and famous coattails.

“Lieutenant Garroway?” the maître d’ asked, bowing slightly. He did not look in the least Japanese. Likely he’d been working here when the place had still been French.

“Yes?”

“This way, if you please!”

She followed him, bemused. She still didn’t understand the point of this summons. “Meet me at the Golden Samurai for lunch,” her father had told her the night before. “I’ll have a surprise for you.”

The problem was, no matter whether it was called the Golden Samurai or the Maison d’Or, this place was way above and beyond her budget. Hell, she wouldn’t start collecting her space pay until she launched, two weeks from now. These places charged a hundred dollars for lunch and probably at least that much just for the privilege of looking at the dinner menu.

Well, if Dad was paying. He could afford it, certainly, now that he was back from Mars and an official, bona fide hero.

“Your table, Lieutenant…”

She stopped cold, thunderstruck. Her father was there, resplendent in full-dress Marine blues, his chest splashed with colored ribbons, representing everything from the red-gold Martian Campaign Medal to the Navy Cross. The silver leaves of a lieutenant colonel winked on his epaulets. His face came alight when he saw her, and he rose to his feet.

But Kaitlin was staring wide-eyed at the man next to him. Tetsuo Ishiwara dropped his napkin and stood. “Konichiwa, Chu-i-san,” he said, bowing deeply. “O-genki des ka?”

“K-konichiwa, Ishiwara-sama!” she stammered back, bowing in return. “Okagesama de, genki des.”

“I am very glad to hear it,” Ishiwara said, shifting to English. “Please, won’t you join us?”

“What?… What?…” She turned and stared at her father as he held her chair for her, feeling as though the ground had just been yanked from beneath her feet.

On the sound system, Sousa had ended, and a different piece was playing now. A detached part of her mind recognized a currently popular Japanese patriotic song: “Washi Muttsu.” The name translated as “Six Eagles”; the reference was to the six Japanese aviators who’d died in the brief war with the United States.

Kaitlin’s eyes were burning. She couldn’t speak.

“We’re talking business, Chicako,” the elder Garroway said, gallantly stepping in to her rescue. “Ishiwara-san is the Japanese ambassador to the United States now, did you know? I learned you two were old friends, and I thought you’d like to see him again.”

“I particularly wanted to extend my congratulations,” Ishiwara said, beaming, “on the honor of your promotion to chu-i.”

“Th-thank you!” She laughed. “Good God, sir, it’s good to see you!”

“The pleasure is entirely mine, Kaiti-chan. I have been talking to your father about his new assignment. Have you heard about it yet?”

She looked at her father, cocking her head to the side. “New assignment?” His current duty station, his assignment ever since his return from Mars, in fact, was the new Space Combat Training Facility down at Quantico.

“I just found out about it yesterday, Mr. Ambassador,” he said. “I didn’t want to tell her until after you and I’d had our little chat this morning.”

“What new assignment?”

“I’m being transferred to Kyoto,” Garroway told her. “I’ll be working with both the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Some really great new stuff is coming out of the Cydonian site. We’ll be working together to start learning how to adapt it to our use.”

“There is astounding potential here,” Ishiwara said, thoughtful. “New types of materials and materials processing, lighter and stronger than anything we can manufacture now. Something that looks suspiciously like temperature-independent superconductivity. A new way of focusing magnetic resonance, that could allow guide-less levitation.” He shook his head. “The list goes on and on. No one ever dreamed that archeology could be such a technologically productive, or such a lucrative science.”

“It sounds like the war is good for business,” she said… and immediately wished she could retract the words. She was still bitter about the war, and Yukio’s death still dragged at her sometimes, even now.

But that didn’t give her the right to be rude to Yukio’s father. “Sumimasen,” she said. Literally referring to an obligation that never ends, the word was one of the more common terms that meant, “I’m sorry.”

“Kaitlin—” Garroway said.

Ishiwara raised his hand. “War,” he said, “is a terrible thing. It destroys families. It destroys peoples. In the circumstances, a minor shitsurei is of no consequence.”

Shitsurei was a minor breach of etiquette, the equivalent of bumping into someone on a crowded maglev platform.

“Domo arigato gozaimasu,” she said, bowing.

“I asked your father to invite you here today,” Ishiwara went on, as though nothing embarrassing had happened. “Partly, of course, I wanted to see you again. But I also wanted to extend to you an invitation. I understand that you are something of an expert in computers.”

“I wouldn’t say I was an expert, exactly,” she said, uncomfortable.

“Of course you wouldn’t say it,” Ishiwara said, eyes twinkling. “You are too much the Nihonjin for that. But others would and do. I would like to offer you the chance to come to Japan, to Kyoto, to work on this new Alliance project with your father. It is supremely important work, and we are looking for the very best people in the field. Some of what we are developing… well, it is astonishing. One of the things your people at Cydonia have uncovered recently suggests a possible new approach to computer memory storage, using quantum gates and atomic matrices.” He tapped the expensive Sony wrist-top on his arm. “It could make these as clumsy and as inefficient as the vacuum-tube ENIAC of a century ago. You could be part of the development team on that project.”

She blinked. The offer was tempting. God, it was tempting! To be back in Japan, and with Dad… “Thank you, Taishi-sama,” she said. “Thank you more than I can say. But it’s not possible. I’ve already got my orders.”

“I can swing it with the Pentagon, if you like,” her father said. “Just give the word. You know that ten thousand Marines would give their right arms and a month’s pay for a shot at your new assignment.”

She smiled. “Which is one reason not to give it up, right?” She looked at Ishiwara. “I’ve been assigned to the First Marine Space Assault Group,” she said proudly. “Under the command of Captain Carmen Fuentes. And it’s no secret where we’re bound.”

“I’ve heard,” Ishiwara said. “The Moon…”

The UN base at Fra Mauro was the specific target. It would be a way of telling the UN that the United States now had absolute space supremacy in the war, and they were going to keep it.

“I appreciate your offer, sir,” she added. “It’s a great honor. But I’m a Marine, and I go where I’m ordered. I’d rather not get a free ride.”

“Told you,” Garroway said. “That’s twenty you owe me, Mr. Ambassador.”

“I understand, Kaiti-chan,” Ishiwara said, bowing. “You must, of course, be true to yourself, as a Marine.”

Kaitlin turned to her father. “You know, we just had a new replacement arrive today,” she said. “Bob

Haskins broke an ankle in training, so they brought this new guy in. I was interviewing him, and it turns out he was on the Candor March with you.”

“Really?” Garroway said. “Who is it?”

“Sergeant Kaminski. He just signed his papers for six more years. A real lifer.”

“He’s a good man,” Garroway said.

The music playing on the sound system had changed again, Kaitlin realized. The yearningly sentimental “Washi Muttsu” had ended, and—possibly because of the two Marines among the clientele—the management was playing a rather artsy vocal rendition of the Marine Corps Hymn.

They’d reached the new verse, the one added just since the return of Garroway and the MMEF from Mars.

From the blue-white vistas over Earth, to the ocher sands of Mars,

We are in the vanguard of Man’s rise, from the earth out to the stars.

As humanity spreads to other worlds and learns what our heritage means,

We will proudly bear the banner of the United States Marines!

She reached out and took her father’s hand. She was crying—partly for Yukio, mostly, though, for happiness and pride.

Like him, she’d made a march of her own. Like him, she was a United States Marine.